Corvette on 95-Y/NT4/Nero 5.10 Success This had me going. I attempted to light up a Plextor PX-W124TSi
12/4/32 at 12x off a Corvette. It bombed under Nero 5.10.56 at 12x (burn
failed, buffer underrun). I throttled it down to 8x, hung the CD-R and
the data drive off the same Corvette, and I was able to burn successfully.

I did have to install the Adaptec
ASPI layer, ForceASPI could not successfully complete the install.
Nero tech support, trying to be helpfull, eventually advised me to enable
DMA on the drives, like I was using W9x/XP or other kiddie OS. Hint: there
is NO setting under NT to enable DMA. If you run NT Diagnostics, it reports
DMA is not being used by the system. Yet Nero Infotool reports DMA... Go
figure.

Burning with Nero 4.0 and WfW 3.11 Ezoto piped up with:
I have nero 4.0 that works on my 9577BTB. I use a Ricoh scsi
burner and a 100meg internal zip drive. I don't have the dos driver
for the ricoh but using the future domain scsi card with the FD drivers
in WFW works perfectly. However after you install it and then run
it it asks for the WINASPI.dll file that is in
WIN95 (OSR2 Win95_02.cab) but that is easy to fix since I copy it from
95 to the WFW system directory. After that I sucessfully burned on
my 9577BTB with the 83mhz ODP and 64meg ram.

One Possible CD Burning Configuration For multitasking during a CD-burn session on a relatively
slow (P90 plus) relatively memory-poor (64MB-128MB) MCA/PCI-bus system,
I recommend using a whole separate SCSI adapter (with no non-bus-mastering
I/O for the "other" stuff) controlling a drive dedicated to the CD Image
and the CD-Writer.
With good software that can work out that all operations
for the CD-burn are on the same adapter+bus between two devices then the
controller *should* be able to do inter-drive operations without anything
but tiny CPU and host memory requirements. This is a "special situation"
solution that should, in fact, be more commonly known, understood and described
in the software blurb for CD-R/RW/DVD-R/RW/RAM packages.
*Never* take the "minimum requirements" on a package/service's
advert to heart. It's based on the poor knowledge and understanding of
the technical issues by the "general public". A "fail-safe" cop-out.
--
Regards,
Tim Clarke (a.k.a. WBST)

CD and DVD MusingsI think you need to differ between two points:
a) what you really need from the hardware
b) what the accompanying (Windows-based) software needs

The data stream required for a 4x burning process is about 500Kbps,
which can be done with a reasonably configured 486DX33 / 16MB and a sufficiently
fast HD subsystem already. But the lot of the fat software packages require
Win 9x / ME or even XP - were the latter two are often too big for older
machines.

The difference between CD-R and CD-RW burner is mainly just a firmware
issue - and a slightly modified laser control. Since CD-RW includes burning
CD-R already the manufacturers opted to drop sole CD-R burners for the
favour of lower-priced CD-RW units. I can see no problem with
it. I would always prefer a CD-RW capable burner over one that does
only CD-R.

Far better however is a multiformat burner that also does DVD in its
various manifestations (DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM ... and
Double Layer) ... plus the CD-R / CD-RW stuff. Would be a bit more expensive
but more versatile as well. Win98SE is sufficient to run e.g. MyDVD software
for creating home-made DVDs My PC300GL 6561 with 333MHz P-II and 128MB
does fine here - and it is far from being a "modern" system.

--
Very friendly greetings from Peter in Germany
http://members.aol.com/mcapage0/mcaindex.htm

*** Reply to: peterwendt@aol.com only ! ***

Controller and Device Issues Odd challenge is with a wide hard drive and burner on
the same controller. I suppose that having a F/W drive talking to a burner
is overkill, since the HD will be sitting around, waiting for the CD burner
to come up for air. I had tried to seperate HD and burner onto seperate
controllers.

A kicker is a Wide drive and CD burner on a F/W. I had a 20x Plextor
(with the HPDB68 port) that refused to run on a Corvette until I disabled
wide messages. Perhaps running the burner and a dedicated HD on the
same Buslogic BT-646 would then be the best setup.

Lack of ASPI Layer Known problem. Use ForceASPI
to install an ASPI layer on your 9x/NT system. I have used it under NT
4.0 without a problem. This will let you have an Adaptec ASPI layer for
a non-Adaptec SCSI adapter. It works with IBM SCSI adapters as well. I
know about Spock and the Corvette personally.

Bootable CD on PS/2Saskia says:
I have probably found out why Server 95 doesn't want to
boot from CDs, except from the ServerGuide CD (thanks Peter!) and a few
others.

The key is the first sector, a kind of "Boot Sector". Not a real one,
of course. It is described in the original El Torito (Boot CD) specification,
but seems to be forgotten in the CD layout description
and marked as "not neccessary". And since El Torito is a specification
by Phoenix and IBM, IBM CDs do work - they knew how to do it. The ServerGuide
CD has this "Boot Sector". And others, who implemented El Torito based
on the specification, just skipped this part.

News!:
I don't know of WinDOS burning programs like Nero and
so on, but mkisofs (from the CDRTools or CDRTools/2 package) generates
an almost valid booting table. The problem: It generates it in a file -
named boot.cat(alog) by default - on the file system instead of sector
0! We need to patch mkisofs to put the boot catalog into the right position.
But first I'll contact the author of mkisofs, maybe he can do it better,
faster, and right into the official source tree.

Writing an utility would be a bit difficult, but not impossbile,
because it would need to analyze the disk image if it already has this
boot catalog. If not, it would need to generate a new one. And if it has,
it could copy it to sector 0, and substract the negative offset to calc
the new relative addresses. But I'm not sure if I can program all these
things ... or better: I'm sure I can't program all these things. Maybe
someone other wants to try it? *g*